It is an often overlooked fact that one of the easiest ways to learn about a foreign culture is through the books it produces for its children. Shortly after my family moved to the Netherlands last summer, we discovered “zoekboeks” (pronounced “zhook-book”) the genre of kids’ picture books that invite you to search (“zoek”) for characters, objects or events obscured by visual busyness. English-language books for kids are hard to come by here, and we didn’t speak or read Dutch yet, so the wordless zoekboek was a welcome find.
And then the zoekboek really opened my eyes.
If you know this genre only from its English-language offshoots like “Where’s Waldo,” you’ve been missing out. Imagine paintings by Pieter Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch, swarming with visual detail, except they’re not about peasants or gardens of earthly delights but recognizably contemporary life.
The first such book we got was “De Vrolijke Vier Seizoenen” (“The Merry Four Seasons,” Google Translate tells me, though the book was published in the United States in 2008 as “In the Town All Year ’Round”), by Rotraut Susanne Berner. It depicts the same seven panoramic scenes in a village (including a residential street, a city plaza and a department store) across the seasons. There’s no text except for signage in the scenes.
Rolling within each season are subplots (a cat chases a mouse; a parrot escapes; a fallen jogger is tended by a passer-by, from which romance blooms), while macroplots are threaded across the year (a woman has a baby; a school is built; a pumpkin grows). The main action belongs to what people do in each season: plant their gardens, buy Christmas trees, gather in the park with lanterns. Maybe the book is nostalgic for a bygone past, but apart from the winter ice skating, snowball-making and the absence of smartphones, the scenes belong to a present we’d comfortably join.
The zoekboek is closely related to a German genre, the Wimmelbuch, or “teeming book.” A “wimmelbook” — in this era of fluid borders and cultures, the word is often rendered as a mash-up of German and English — is “a book of plenitude,” writes Cornelia Rémi, a German professor who is the only scholar known to consider the genre in depth.
She argues that the zoekboek and the wimmelbook differ from each other: The zoekboek gives the reader explicit search tasks (where’s Waldo?) and often uses words, while the wordless wimmelbooks “allow for manifold reading options and encourage a highly active response from children and adults, which rightfully might be called a form of playing.” When I now read traditional storybooks (which we also do at home), they seem rigid and prescribed in comparison.
In the Cologne train station bookstore I found “Mein schönstes Wimmelbuch” (“My Prettiest Wimmelbook”), by Ali Mitgutsch. A German illustrator, he is credited with inventing the form with “Rundherum in meiner Stadt,” or “All Around My Town,” published in 1968. One spread depicts a mountaintop in ski season, whitened by snow and swarming with skiers; another shows the same mountaintop in summer, thick with hikers and picnickers. Another spread features a beach: people laying out, playing ball, digging, urinating under the boardwalk, sunning naked.
This unabashed display of human bodies in wimmelbooks is wondrous: “Een huis vol,” by Doro Göbel and Peter Knorr, depicts, among other things, a pregnant woman getting checked by a midwife, a kid sitting on a toilet and another soaping up in the shower, but those are morsels of the book’s charm. The point of view pivots around a ring of houses, viewed in cutaway as if they’re dollhouses. At the center of the ring is a rickety merry-go-round, untarped for a party by a man living in a bowtop wagon, who in one page heads to the preschool with a shovel to help bury a rabbit.
I have to resist listing all the activities crammed into the pages of my favorite wimmelbooks because they would come across as cringingly mundane. But the cramming is, in truth, transcendent, this gentle collapsing of time and bending of space to capture worldly things in their everyday profusion. These detail-laden scenes defy both photography and film. They’re human constructions for satisfying the cognitive pleasures of collecting clues, exploring and telling stories.
My family reads our wimmelbooks so much, we’re loving them out of their bindings. But they really sank their teemingness into me as I was reading Richard Sennett’s “The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile,” in which he describes how the political revolutions of 1848 redefined nationalism from one based on monarchies or concocted geographic partitions to one based on ordinary rituals, everyday life and authentic selves.
The revolutionaries of the age “believed that a nation was enacted by custom, by the manner and mores of a volk: the food people eat, how they move when they dance, the dialect they speak, the precise forms of their prayers,” Mr. Sennett writes. Wimmelbooks do just that — they show people glorying “in their ordinary selves,” as he puts it.
That the wimmelbooks don’t depict the volk I live among but are often outdated visions (given changing demographics in northern Europe) is obvious. Yet they underscore another of Mr. Sennett’s themes: the foreign exile can’t envision herself in the teeming, which I imagine happening to me when I return to the United States, unable to place myself in the wimmelbook of American life.
If such a thing were even possible, that is. What’s interesting to me is the visual perspective of wimmelbooks reflects the experience of riding not in cars but in trains and trams, where you pass close enough to houses to admire the tchotchkes in the windows and even through them to the back garden, at a slightly elevated angle, and at a pace slow enough to whet the curiosity about the residents yet quick enough to miss them if they should appear. Riding in a car never inspires me to the same curiosity.
The activity in wimmelbooks also has a healthy, comfortable publicness, almost as if people on the pages realize the walls of their houses are transparent — and they don’t mind. Even though we see into houses in some wimmelbooks (because exterior walls have been magically dissolved), we don’t see into people’s heads; by featuring the exteriority of life in its community dimension, the wimmelbooks leave the people private. It’s like depicting a snowstorm through its flurries and drifts, because the point of view of each snowflake is irrelevant.
In the pages of wimmelbooks, everyone lives as if they’ve never left, nor for that matter are they recently arrived. Everyone is living together in their teeming everyday, and that may be a fine model for living together.
Michael Erard is writer in residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
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